2016 Mobile App Trends: Feeling Secure Through Security

2015 was a monster year for mobile app advancements. Before that, 2014 was a monster year for mobile app advancements… and the year before that… and the year before that. With mobile apps being more popular than ever with some reports saying that smartphones users spend nearly 90% of their “smartphone-time” on apps, there’s no reason to believe that mobile apps won’t take even greater leaps and bounds in 2016. Now that it’s December, it’s the perfect time for speculation. So in this series we’ll be doing exactly that. So what’s the first big trend we think we’ll see in 2016? Bigger, badder, more secure security.

So the bad news is that as of right now according to a Gartner report, 75% of apps currently on the market would fail the most basic security tests. According to them “Enterprises that embrace mobile computing and bring your own device (BYOD) strategies are vulnerable to security breaches unless they adopt methods and technologies for mobile application security testing and risk assurance… Most enterprises are inexperienced in mobile application security. Even when application security testing is undertaken, it is often done casually by developers who are mostly concerned with the functionality of applications, not their security.”

The good news is that developers see this troubling trend and are doing something about it, and 2016 could feel much more secure for mobile users. Apple already has additional security features on its iOS 9 platform and Android is giving it’s Android 6.0 a major security overhaul.

Security gaps and leaks will no longer be an accepted risk of running an app. 2016 will see more and more personal information being stored on these apps (SSNs, bank details, etc.), and apps that don’t offer the security measures users demand will find themselves fading into obscurity.

So expect apps in 2016 to have more detailed mobile phone authentication procedures or multi-factor authentication (MFA). This will include more apps that will require a PIN-code that you’ll receive over SMS to verify the app. So far that’s been a one-time process, but we suspect that expiration times for these codes will become the norm to avoid auto-generated combinations.

So will mobile apps be more secure in 2016? In short, they have to be.

CEO and Co-founder of Neon Roots
Ben Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Neon Roots, a digital development agency with a mission to destroy the development model and rebuild it from the ground up. After a brief correspondence with Fidel Castro at age nine, Ben decided to start doing things his own way, going from busboy to club manager at a world-class nightclub before he turned 18. Since then, Ben has founded or taken a leading role in 5 businesses in everything from software development to food and entertainment.